About "conclusions"--from the "living wage" thread

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This is a follow-up to a side conversation that began in this thread.

I offered the following passage and claimed it’s a fairly simple task to locate the passage’s conclusion. (My point was just to explain that though it’s a simple reading task, I meet approximately seventy people each semester who can’t do it, and this in turn was by way of arguing against the view that a mortgage loan document–85 dense pages of technical and legal language–is easily comprehensible to lay people in general. The merits of that particular argument should be discussed in the other thread. MEanwhile, over here, I’ll explain why I said the conclusion of the passage is easy to locate, and what, in general, conclusions are.)

The passage in question is:

I’ll stipulate off the bat (as I did in the other thread) that it’s not the best written passage in the world. It was written on the fly, intended to illustrate a particular kind of complication to a classroom. But anyway, it’s clear what the conclusion of the passage is supposed to be, even if it’s just a little awkwardly worded.

First of all, what’s a conclusion? A conclusion is a thought that is supposed to “follow from” another thought. What’s this “follow from” mean? Basically, thought A is supposed to “follow from” thought B when thought B is supposed to be a reason for thinking that thought A is true.

In other words, when thought A is intended to give evidence for, a rationale for, a reason for thinking, support for, etc., thought B, then thought B is a conclusion, and thought A is a premise.

When thought A answers the question “what reason does this author/speaker think he has given for us to believe thought B?” then thought B is a conclusion and thought A is a premise.

When thought B answers the question “what implication does this author/speaker think we should draw from thought A?” then thought B is a conclusion and thought A is a premise.

When thought A is supposed to answer the question “Why should I believe thought B?” then thought A is a premise, thought B is a conclusion.

When thought B is supposed to answer the question “so what?” concerning thought A, then thought B is a conclusion and thought A a premise.

Well I think I’ve probably said that in enough ways!

There are these things often called “indicator phrases” which help you locate premises and conclusions. Some are called “premise indicators.” These indicate, usually (but unfortunately not always) that the thought that follows is supposed to be a premise for the thought that precedes the indicator. Meanwhile, of course, “conclusion indicators” indicate (even more usually, but again unfortunately not in every possible case) that the thought that follows is supposed to be a conclusion from the thought that precedes the indicator.

Here are a couple of very simple examples–the simplest possible kinds of examples, in fact.

The indicator here is “therefore.” It’s a conclusion indicator. It means the following thought (i.e. “the new species is a mammal”) is supposed to be a conclusion following from the preceding thought (i.e. “the new species has hair.”)

Another example:

A strange example, you might think! But notice that it has an indicator–“since”. That indicator is a premise indicator. This means it signals that what follows (i.e. “there is a frog in my house”) is supposed to be a premise leading to the preceding thought (i.e. “The sky is blue”) as a conclusion. “Supposed to” is an important word here! The reasoning seems bizarre. But as bizarre as it may seem (and really, you don’t know whether it’s bizarre or not because you don’t know the context in which the claim was made) it is, nevertheless reasoning and as such has the premise/conclusion structure I’ve been discussing. The person who said the above thinks, for whatever reason, that from the fact that there is a frog in his house, he ought to draw the conclusion that the sky is blue. Who knows why he thinks this?! But think it he does.

Alright, with all that said, let’s jump straight to the more complex passage quoted first above.

“George is an atheist, and most atheists are liberal. So George is probably a liberal.” Let’s stop there and notice we have a conclusion indicator–“So.” Does this mean we’ve found the conclusion? Well, in these more complex passages, we find that there may be more than one conclusion indicator. And this is one such example–since the indicator “so then” appears late in the passage. So what are we supposed to do with such cases? How can there be two conclusions?

In this case (and in most cases where there is more than one conclusion) it turns out that only one of them is THE conclusion of the passage. The other one(s) is(are) “subconclusions.” They are supposed to follow from something, but they are then supposed to lead on to some further conclusion.

So what about “So george is probably a liberal?” Conclusion or subconclusion? Well, notice that immediately afterwards, we have “So then, George probably supports…” That begins with a conclusion indicator. As I said above, conclusion indicators signify that what follows is supposed to be a conclusion that can be drawn* from what precedes the indicator. The answer is becoming clear then–“George is probably a liberal,” coming as it does before a conclusion indicator, is almost certainly not supposed to be “the” conclusion of hte passage, but rather is a subconclusion. This leads us, then, to the next thought as a candidate for being “the” conclusion of hte passage.

The next thought is “George probably supports increased welfare benefits.” Is this the conclusion? Well, the next thought is “(since) most liberals support increased welfare benefits.” (I put “since” in parentheses because it’s not really part of the “thought” as I use the term. It precedes the thought.) That is headed by a premise indicator, meaning it’s supposed to be a premise for “george most likely supports…” rather than a conclusion from it.

So we have our answer! “George most likely supports” is a conclusion, as we saw, and moreover, is not itself meant to support anything else in the passage. (Rather, everything else in the passage is meant to support it.) That makes it the conclusion of the passage.

Questions? (I’m actually hoping to get this and more all written down in a way that doesn’t manage to clarify so much it simply confuses, for use as a study aid for students… so any questions you have could help me with that task…)

*This is a simplification–often there are thoughts from the passage intended to come between the two thoughts in order of reasoning. That won’t be an issue for this example though.

2

Much shorter explanation:

Find the conclusion indicators. Notice there are two of them. One of the conclusions comes right before the other. So either the passage simply has two final conclusions, or one of those is a subconclusion leading to the other. In this case, you can see by reading that the first conclusion is supposed to lead to the second conclusion. So it looks like that second concusion is the conclusion. Test that hypothesis by asking yourself whether the whole passage does, indeed, seem oriented toward demonstrating that George most likely supports increased welfare spending. It does seem so oriented, doesn’t it? So there you go–“George most likely supports increase welfare spending” is the conclusion.

3

I got the answer right it seems, but my confusion stemmed mainly from the awkward wording of the question and the fact that I don’t diagram sentences into premise/conclusion format regularly. If you had stated the same quotation and then asked me “what is the POINT of what the author was trying to say in the quotation?” I would have instantly said that George is likely to support increased welfare benefits.

I often had trouble with these kind of questions in school, because I could come up with many possible answers for the question, and many of them plausible, depending on how one meant multiple words in the question. Where teachers saw obvious meaning (since they y’know, had the privlege of being in their head when they wrote it), I saw ambiguity they claimed was not there, and they sometimes seemed angry as if I was playing dumb.

Did you explain what YOU meant by conclusion before asking the class? I bet your percentage of people with the right answer would skyrocket if you explained what you meant by conclusion beforehand because it has multiple meanings in different contexts in common useage.

4

Normally I’d agree with you, long paragraphs (especially if you’re reading philosophy or politics) can have many plausible answers, but I think this example is very straight forward.

The only sticking point is that the passage is actually two arguments – or an argument and a lemma (for back of a better term).

  1. George is an atheist
  2. Atheists are usually liberals; therefore,
  3. George is likely a liberal
  4. Liberals generally support increased welfare benefits; therefore,
  5. George likely supports increased welfare benefits.

I don’t see what else you can really get out of that statement, unless, again, you want to nitpick about there being a sub-conclusion and an ultimate conclusion.

5

One of the things I thought he might’ve been asking was almost like it was a trick question. He said:

All of those statements are plausible/truish (I have no idea if atheists are actually more liberal on average though), but in the real world no one assumes an atheist is more likely to support increased welfare benefits. So when you ask me “what conclusion do you get from the author” one of the possible answers I can think of would be “Presumptuous bastard, isn’t he?” What the author is SAYING is obvious, what you are ASKING about the author is very vague. Just asking “what is the conclusion of the passage” is very open-ended and I don’t blame a good portion of the students not understanding what you are asking while having full reading comprehension of the passage. It might surely have been more obvious within the context of the classroom but I certainly might have misunderstood what you were asking for even though I knew the right answer.

6

I didn’t ask what conclusion you get from the author, and also, “presumptuous bastard, isn’t he?” isn’t a conclusion you can get from the author, rather, it’s a conclusion you would have drawn about the author.

From experience I’ve learned to avoid using “point” as a synonym for “conclusion” because there are many, many different concepts “point” triggers in different people. Mostly, I find, people associate point with “emphasis.” So for example, most people will misidentify the conclusion of this passage:

because the second thought has all the “emphasis” (for lack of a better word coming to mind). One way they’ll articulate why they thought the second thought is the conclusion is by saying “because that’s his point–his point is that he is the father.” But of course the conclusion is the first thought, not the second one.
Providing an explanation of the concept “conclusion” and then asking “what is the conclusion of passage X” (which, of course I’ve explained what “conclusion” means before asking this question) is not at all ambiguous. That’s not to say no one should have to learn how to understand it. But the problem–the thing that needs fixing–is definitely in the one who doesn’t understand the question, and not in the question being asked. The one who doesn’t understand has something of wider significance to learn. All the questioner needs to learn is what’s going on in the mind of the one who doesn’t understand.

7

I didn’t find it difficult, but I can see why someone would be confused, particularly if they’re used to thinking of “conclusion” as a synonym for “end.”

8

The way this is put might confuse some students into thinking that the conclusion/premise relation is a relationship between one thought (sentence, reason, whatever) and a conclusion.

If one thinks there are cases where A doesn’t support C, B doesn’t support C, but A and B taken together do, one might be worried about this way of putting things. Perhaps the “intended to” construction disolves any such worry.

9

And sometimes “premise indicators” and “conclusion indicators” use the same words, e.g. “implies”. Some students might think a word that is in one catagory cannot be in the other.

10

TATG thanks for those comments. The fact that there can be more than one reason given for any particular conclusion is definitely not reflected in what I wrote. Thanks for pointing that out. I think what I wrote is accurate but could be misleading if someone thought it answered the question “can there be more than one reason for a conclusion?” so were I to incorporate it into a more complete explanation I’d definitely need to keep that in mind.

Really, IME, this kind of thing is really difficult to learn from a written explanation. It takes, AFAICT, just tons of copious practice to build a kind of instict for it. But I’d love to be able, in any case, to have a written explanation for my students better than the cursory gloss most textbooks seem to provide.

11

And sometimes people just won’t read what you wrote attentively. I meant that “implies” is an if-then sometimes, and a consequence relation other times, but that isn’t how you defined “premise indicators”.

I do think it would be good to spell out possible exceptions, because you can fill in the gap in different ways, and people just might make wrong assumptions about the possible exceptions (and in ways other than my version of just getting things wrong). For example; A because B; because B, A; and “because” used as a conjunction, for instance. I’m not sure if you ever get “because” used in a way that doesn’t indicate structure, but it would be nice if you did.

12

This seems true. I think natural language translation is one of the harderd parts (to teach/learn) in a logic course. Many students just are not used to looking at a peice of writing, and thinking of it as an argument, with a structure of some sort, so it seems to be a whole new experience to a number of students. Along with this, the ambiguity (in many different ways) of natual langauge, and the loss of meaning (from natural language to symbols) can be hard to overcome.

13

I have no quibble with what the OP said about conclusions and subconclusions.

I do have a quibble with the quoted statement from the original thread (a quibble which may have been brought up in that thread; I haven’t read everything in it):

There may be something like Simpson’s paradox lurking here, that makes the final conclusion invalid even though both (sub-)arguments are valid.

Suppose, for example, that there are exactly 10 atheists in the world, of which 9 are liberals, and none of whom support increased welfare benefits. There are also 1000 other, non-atheist liberals in the world, and all of them do support increased welfare benefits.

In that case, knowing that George is an atheist means that he is probably a liberal. Knowing that George is liberal does, in and of itself, mean that he most likely supports increased welfare benefits. But knowing that George is an atheist does not allow one to conclude that he probably supports increased welfare benefits.

14

But note that the question isn’t “is this good reasoning?” but rather, “what is the conclusion of this passage?” Even bad reasoning has an identifiable conclusion–that’s what makes it reasoning.